e is for edward estlin

The lower-case in the title is in honor of poet e. e. cummings, who often preferred that typographic format.  Most people wouldn't consider him in the same breath with the word "manifesto,"  but have those people ever read the introduction to his 1938 edition of Collected Poems?

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople.

-- it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.

His style takes some acclimation, but his intent is soon clear.  A quick reading might make you think he's being a bit snobbish himself, but I think the main goal is intimacy... it's just you (the reader) and him (the writer) and you've shut everyone else out of your conversation.  And the main thing he's telling you (yes, you!) is that you've got to remain open to the possibilities.

you and I are not snobs.  We can never be born enough.  We are human beings; for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery, the mystery of growing; the mystery which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves.  You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming.  Life, for eternal us, is now; and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything, catastrophic included.

Manifestos are all about a better, more intense, more real future, and he paints that into his word-picture, too.

Miracles are to come.  With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, a human being; somebody who said to those near him, when his fingers would not hold a brush "tie it into my hand" --

I have a feeling that he's quoting some actual artist who may have said something like that.  The ultimate ginger, perhaps?  Searching the interwebs for this quote just gives me back this essay.

I referred obliquely to Doctor Who with my Van Gogh link up there.  As one gets to the end of this slightly garbled manifesto, it increasingly reminds me of the Doctor's wide-eyed, unblinking perspective on the universe...

nothing proving or sick or partial.  Nothing false, nothing difficult or easy or small or colossal.  Nothing ordinary or extraordinary, nothing emptied or filled, real or unreal; nothing feeble and known or clumsy and guessed. [...] Never the murdered finalities of wherewhen and yesno, impotent nongames of wrongright and rightwrong; never to gain or pause, never the soft adventure of undoom, greedy anguishes and cringing ecstasies of inexistence; never to rest and never to have: only to grow.

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question

Epilogue:  I couldn't have written this post -- which mentions e e cummings, intimacy, and gingers -- without thinking of something, someone very specific.  So I might as well spill the beans.  Yes, it was a girl (a redhead more ginge' than Amy Pond or Geri Halliwell) who first got me interested in this strange poet.  If I ever get back to that fiction piece that I started tinkering with last fall, you'll see her immortalized as a Nobel Prize winner.  :-)